RHEL 10 Guest OS Customization Failure and Password Configuration in VMware Cloud Director

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

When deploying a RHEL 10 or Rocky 10 template in VMware Cloud Director, the admin password is not set by guest customization, as expected.

• Admin (root) password is not set during VM deployment.
• Guest OS Customization script fails to run.
• Network interfaces appear disconnected after deployment.
• VMware Tools logs show errors indicating conflict with cloud-init.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Director 10.6.x
• RHEL 10.x / Rocky 10.x
• vSphere 8.0

Cause

Guest customization functionality is provided by the underlying vSphere and is contingent on compatibility with that environment. For example, RHEL 10 deprecates the ifcfg-rh format and removes the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory. VMware’s traditional Perl-based customization engine relies on this path. If cloud-init is installed on the template, open-vm-tools may hand over customization control to cloud-init, which often lacks the configuration to process VCD-specific UI data.

For more details, see the related vCenter Article:

Guest OS Customization may fail to customize RHEL 10.x

Resolution

Choose one of the two methods below to resolve this conflict.

Method 1: Switch to Perl-based customization engine (Legacy Path)

1. Log in to the RHEL 10 VM template.
2. Install required packages: sudo dnf install open-vm-tools perl -y
3. Ensure the legacy network directory exists: sudo mkdir -p /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
4. Modify the cloud-init configuration to disable VMware customization: Edit /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg and ensure the following is removed or set to true: disable_vmware_customization: true
5. Power off the VM and save as a template.

Method 2: Use cloud-init customization engine

1. Log in to the RHEL 10 VM template.
2. Edit /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg and set: disable_vmware_customization: false
3. Ensure the datasource for VMware is configured correctly in cloud-init (refer to KB 311873).
4. Clean the cloud-init instance: sudo cloud-init clean --seed
5. Power off the VM and save as a template.

 

Additional Information

For more information regarding guest customization compatibility, please refer to the following:

Guest OS Compatibility

Configure a guest customization method for an unsupported Linux distribution

For additional information on how cloud-init is used to customize a Linux VM, please refer to the following article:

How does vSphere Guest OS Customization work with cloud-init to customize a Linux VM